Have just started a Facebook group for victims of Orange UK’s inability to fix their 3G service in Central London. It’s been about 2 months now, and when I ring the service folks they talk rubbish about when the service should be back up, engineers on the case etc … what the hell is going on here?
Worth commenting that the BBC is capturing 58% of all online audiences for the World Cup … a big enough number to get me blogging again after an embarrassingly long gap!
Quoted in full.
Watch reconstruction happen in real-time: Digg Spy.
A viscerally powerful demonstration of value shifting to the edge: in this case, outside the boundaries of the firm itself.
A viscerally powerful demonstration of the most important concepts behind 2.0 strategy, and why they fundamentally upend the orthodoxies of 1.0 strategy: without understanding why openness, sharing, transparency, and zero intelligence, are deep sources of economic value creation - not just fuzzy, feelgood notions - Digg Spy, or reconstructors like it, couldn’t even be conceptualized.
Finally, a viscerally powerful demonstration of strategy decay and competence traps - why the media industry is unable to leverage these new economics to build edge competencies: because the assumptions that must be overturned are deeply embedded in their core businesses, strategies - and ways of making of the world.
This is an important post; if you’re a regular reader, I hope you’ll click over, check the link for a while, watch it evolve, then come back here and re-read the post.
New Scientist on those Superbowl ads …
Brain scans of Super bowl viewers suggest that certain commercials more effectively excite the brain’s empathy and reward centres, making them “light up”.
Now, if we can just make the ads more interesting than watching paint dry, we’re home!
… both cool and scary.
Two employees have been injected with RFID chips this week as part of a new requirement to access their company’s datacenter.
From the beeb …
American Idol got nearly twice as many viewers as the televised Grammys ceremony when they clashed on US TV, audience figures have shown.
Talent show Idol, the most watched US TV programme, was seen by 28m viewers when it went head to head with the annual awards event.
This is … well put:
We turn the page, you add an insert. We ban billboards from our state, you fly banners over our beaches. We hang up on your telemarketing, you call back with answer machine message leaving auto-bots. We install an email spam filter, you send spam to weblog comments and trackbacks. We stop reading comment-spammed blogs, you launch spam blogs whose sole purpose is to peddle your crap. We block your pop ups, you fuck with technology to serve them anyway. We stop watching TV to spend more time with online gaming, you plaster our games with advertising. We skip our ads with our DVR, you plaster commercial graphics all over the screen during programming. We become immune to advertising, you launch a hoard of buzz marketers on our ass.
Proliferating this madness or simply launching the inevitable next sorte against the ad-skipping public, Goodyear, in a DVR-proof advertising deal with NBC, will morph its actual blimp into animated versions of the blimp, floating it across the screen during Olympic programming to deliver commercial messaging promoting the company’s TripleTred and SilentArmor tire technology. Surely, now, the time is undoubtedly ripe now for an enterprising company to develop a DVR-embedded technology which will swipe anything but actual programming from the screen just as several online ad blocking technologies now do on the web.
While this new advertising endeavor may be met with skepticism and repulsion, advertising, after all, does make the free world go ’round. We may hate it but without it, we’d be looking at a pay per view world with monthly cable TV bills upwards of $500. Oh, excuse me, we have to go. The people from Hooters are here to paint a gigantic pair of Hooters-branded breasts on our driveway so as to reap the benefits of Google Maps.
Great little idea this - check it out.
This from Dion Hinchcliffe expains a lot if you’re looking to understand the spirit of Web 2.0:
2.63 new mashups a day. That’s what John Musser’s terrific new Mashup Feed site says is current the creation rate. If that rate flattens out today, which isn’t likely, that’s over 960 new mashups every year. Mashups, composite web applications partially constructed from the services and content from other web sites, are taking off with an amazing speed. Yet they are a relatively new phenomenon in terms of being this widespread and pervasive. All this even though mashups, like blogs and wikis, were actually possible from the creation date of the first forms-capable browser. So why the sudden widespread interest?
… her latest cool move is to collaborate with The Gorillaz for a live piece at the Grammys. Whatagal. Too tired to link (t-shirt opportunity?)
… except this one … Western Union abruptly ceases telegram services:
Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage.
From The Deal:
According to a New York Post report, Google Inc. is in talks with Napster to either buy the online music service outright, or form some sort of partnership to offer a Google music service. Let’s ignore that both sides have denied the rumors for a second and take a look at what this could mean.
Surely a smart move:
The firm will sell movies and TV shows over the internet in Germany, Austria and Switzerland from March. Its In2Movies service will use the same file-sharing technology that has led to an increase in movie piracy. Warner Bros did not reveal price details but said it planned to widen its international use of P2P networks.
…. not the usual kind, where rage, frustration and bewilderment send me home shattered and fixed in fight, flight or weep mode … no ….
I was wearily gazing at the (new) plasma on-bus TV on the Number 18 to Chalk Farm this morning when I noticed a “25% off sale” ad for an Apple vendor, which caught my attention momentarily. What woke me up (activated my P300 waves …) was the fact the the store was right on (or very close to …) the route of the 18 bus. Contextual, behavioural? Interesting.
From Ars Technica, we learn that the BBC brought consumers together with industry crusties to discuss life on their respective planets …
The BBC News website recently gave the public an opportunity to submit questions to several music industry executives. Questions were entered from the UK, the US, and several other European countries, and the BBC selected the 8 best for submission to the panel. Although some of the results are understandably UK-centric and all of the experts stayed squarely on the party platform, it makes for a pretty good read, and the exchange does shed some light on the industry’s stance toward downloading, DRM, and the future. I’ll take a look at a few of the more interesting responses and try to put them in perspective.
I feel guilty for not having (quite) lived up to my promise of regular posts and casts during my stay at the global music event Midem in Cannes. The truth is that there wasn’t a whole lot that was truly newsworthy, in terms of the remit of this blog, which is to uncover innovation news and trends in media.
The industry itself toed the line it always does, insisting on holding its place as the biggest little brother in Big Media. One day the business will wake up and realise that its stance on artist contracts, copyright enforcement and, well, the way the world works, are keeping it on the wrong side of the fence from 10’s of billions of extra dollars of revenue. If online ads - a business that only got motoring 3-4 years ago - can come in in 2005 with a global value of $21bn - already over 50% of the estimated value of the music industry @ $40bn - isn’t the writing on the wall?
Compare the cozy hum at Midem with the uber-hive buzz at CES just 2 weeks before. The big guns in Las Vegas were declaring changes in the global media game, huge investments and repositionings to fuel their land grab into Media 2.0. Even Intel and Cisco are heading for the playing field with new boots and brandings. Cannes, in contrast, felt almost sleepy, as the mobile operators and online distributors - surely the most critical outlets in Music 2.0 to come - talked more of their frustrations in getting music to dance with them to a post 1950’s tune. I came away feeling that again players from outside the industry - a few years ago Apple, now Starbucks - are showing the way here.
While I had a ‘good Midem’ and met some fascinating new people and I think future partners and clients at Midem, not one of them was a label or a publisher. I tell a lie, the folks from Sunday Best and Just Music - both pioneering British indies, both (coincidentally) generating serious funds from TV synch deals alongside their traditional retail bucks - impressed the hell out of me.
Otherwise? A little depressing, to be honest with you. But we’ll be there next year.
PS: No brands (that I saw), and no agencies (except for the excellent Frukt guys). But watch out for the MusicWeek Brands and Music event this June in London. It’ll be a killer.
This from Adrants:
“We’ve pretty much stopped with TV ads or radio ads or branded ads. It just wasn’t worth it anymore. Online, there are just many more possibilities.” That’s a refrain we’ve hearing more on more over the next few years as marketers realize traditional advertising ain’t all it’s cracked up to be anymore. Amsterdam Tourism Board Internet manager Sebastian Paauw uttered that phrase when commenting on the Board’s deal with BlogAds under which the Board, in connection with BlogAds, will send 25 bloggers to Amsterdam in exchange for ad space on their blogs. While the bloggers are not required to write anything about their trip, bloggers being bloggers, there will, no doubt, be a litany of posts covering their escapades during their five day stay.
Buy the (UK only?) edition of The Economist this week and read an astoundingly wrong account of Big Media’s prospects in digital … with no account at all of the impact of the consumer experience, and with an almost unbelievable rap along the “Content is King” theme. Just when we thought we were making some progress in getting the message across!
Some outstanding Cheney-bollox from CNN …
NEW YORK (AP) — Vice President Dick Cheney defended the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance program Thursday, calling it an essential tool in monitoring al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.
Ning may be on the way out … from TechCrunch:
The idea of Ning, which launched in October 2005, is brilliant. Let people easily create social applications tailored with difference web services. Allow others to clone those applications and take the code from them directly into whatever they are building instead of building from scratch. Watch everything evolve as better and better stuff gets built, which in turn is used to build even better stuff. Ning leverages the platform by aggregating the applications and selling advertising and premium tools/features.
Another great store bites the dust … as much as I love what’s happening at the sharp end, I mourn the end of this …
LOS ANGELES, California (Hollywood Reporter) — They’re throwing a wake of sorts for the Rhino Records store Saturday and Sunday.
Founded in 1973, the venerable record shop officially closed its doors after the turn of the year, hard on the heels of the folding of crosstown competitor Aron’s Records.
… and I say RIP to this great, great performer. Listen to “Land of a Thousand Dances” very, very loud, try to do all or some of the dances at the same time, and then say a prayer for the man. My heart hurts. More here, and here.
Just found this (quite new I think) blog called Publishing 2.0 … check out this nice and brief note re the advertising explosion (or is that implosion?).
Here’s another reason why the blogosphere’s vision of the web as an open marketplace likely won’t come to pass: the BIG advertisers won’t finance it.
Let’s face it, the Googlenomics revolution has been financed by the little guys, who have profitably grown their businesses with pay-per-click ads. For small companies, brand management is secondary to driving sales. Not so for the big, bad corporate advertisers.
And this piece, debunking the marriage of Web and Media 2.0, is critical reading. Not sure if I agree with it all in terms of detail, but the POV is important and seems robust.
Here’s the problem — Web 2.0 is not a great platform for helping the average person consume media.
Consumer-created media is transforming the content landscape for the better, and consumer-controlled media is undoubtedly the new paradigm. But the average person does not have much time (if any) to spend creating media and has patience for only a finite amount of choice. Bloggers and others who put a lot of time and effort into media consumption and media creation are outliers — people may want something more customized than the morning paper, but they still want the simplicity and leisure feel. Media based on Web 2.0 is just too hard.
Handy summary from Michael Parekh:
Although the government request in THIS instance does not seem to invade specific individual privacy rights (as Yahoo! has maintained), the larger issue is one of the “slippery slope”.
As I read my email on Google’s Gmail with sponsored ads on the right on the VERY subject of the emails I’m reading, I must admit this issue does give me pause.
Most mainstream Internet users are probably OK with trading some of privacy by trusting Google, but it’s a VERY fragile trust at this EARLY stage of living more and more of their life online.
And what the government is doing in this instance, IS NOT helping.
